On October 7, 2023, the world watched as Hamas terrorists and their supporters spilled over Gaza’s borders into Israel, slaughtering and torturing anyone in their paths.
The enormity of the attack has always been clear, but a recently released report conducted by the Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women’s rights organization, recounts the barbarism of that day in excruciating, granular detail.
It is not for the faint-hearted. The Daily Mail was the first to report on the commission’s findings, which were compiled by researchers who interviewed over 400 witnesses, survivors, and experts, and who sifted through 10,000 photographs and 1,800 hours of “visual analysis.” The report’s authors detailed evidence of mass murder, systemic rape, mutilation, dismemberment, sexual torture, immolation, and medieval torments once consigned to history.
“There wasn’t a single body that just ‘died normally,’” one survivor told examiners. “Every single one had gone through torture.” One woman who was gang-raped by terrorists had her breasts cut off. Her attackers toyed with one, threw it in the street, and raped her before executing their victim while her assault was ongoing. Another woman was stabbed to death and posthumously raped in front of witnesses. “In parts of the body, in the intimate area, nails were embedded,” said one first responder of the bodies he encountered. Another emergency worker described “aluminum cans, grenades, nails, blunt objects, rods, household tools and spike-like instruments, inserted into genitals and other parts of the body” of the victims.
That practice was, apparently, systemic. In one room where bodies were discovered “completely mutilated,” a third witness found “knives, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers,” and other “tools from the household” inserted into corpses.
The torture was gleeful — filmed by its executors, in many cases — and there were no bounds of human decency.
